With a donation of a new Poweredge server from Dell Inc., and a successful hardware fundraiser for disks last month, the long-suffering ktown.kde.org site gets a welcome upgrade, and a new hosting package from the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum. Read on for the details on the new server, Immanuel.

For several years, ktown.kde.org has carried the burden of hosting the KDE bug tracker. Furthermore, it is the FTP master that synchronizes new releases and hosts developer content. With the growth of the KDE project and surrounding community, it isn't surprising that over time, this server has become increasingly overloaded.

The server

Since this server plays such an important function for KDE, we had to make sure that a new server would be powerful enough for current loads and would anticipate future growth. Thanks to a generous donation from Dell, the KDE project can now move the bug tracker to an new host. The new server is a Dell Poweredge 1750 with 4GB RAM. It is powered by two 3GHz Xeon processors with hyperthreading. This chassis will handle its tasks more responsively than the previous Pentium 3 server with 1.5 GB of RAM.

Immanuel during its setup.

The hosting

With the new Dell Poweredge server, the next step for an improved bug tracker was the hosting, and associated bandwidth. Enter the Leibniz Computing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum) in Munich. The LRZ has kindly offered to host our new server, giving us secure, stable and high performance hosting.

The community

Finally, to make sure that the new server has the storage capacity to meet KDE's needs for the foreseeable future, we looked to upgrade the hard disks. On July 19, a Dot story announced a hardware fundraiser.

The response from the community was immediate and overwhelming. What we intended as a short fundraiser turned into an flood of donations that continues weeks later. To date, 7,000 Euro have been donated by both individuals and businesses. Parts of the fundraiser have been used to purchase and install a new 250GB RAID array in the Poweredge server, the rest will be spent on further hardware purchases.

What can you say about our users and community? Sincerely, we are amazed by your generosity.

The results

So without any further ado, please welcome Immanuel. Immanuel has already become KDE's new FTP master site, an upgrade that will make the roll-out of new releases faster than ever. Further, work has begun on porting over the current KDE bug tracker. A new version of Bugzilla will be installed, and our web team is preparing an up-to-date user interface to accompany it.

As KDE continues to flourish and expand, our ability to release timely bug-free software is critical. The previous bug tracking and ftp solution was showing the strain of supporting a popular Open Source Desktop, and many responded. The KDE team would like to thank Dell Inc. for the hardware donation and the Leibniz Computing Centre for the hosting opportunity. And finally, a massive Thank-you goes to the community for the donations.

KDE has now secured a server solution that will result in tangible benefits for all of our users. The KDE infrastructure team is really happy that when KDE asks for help, the response from businesses and individuals is deafening. We at KDE are grateful and hope to repay your support with a continuing stream of quality Open Source desktop software.

Comments

How about putting a permanent Donate button on the KDE home page (KDE.org)? A lot of people visit only the home page to find out what's new, and I'm sure some will be willing to donate especially if they are please with a particular release or application.

Another idea is to have a "Friends of KDE" page, similar to what gnome has. Perhaps put a button on the KDE's home page saying "Friends of KDE: Donate now!".

How many users visit the KDE homepage at all? I love and support KDE, and it hurts me to say this, but the KDE Homepage is terrible. That's just my opinion, of course. I go straight to the DOT and Planet to get news. The home page seems to have been designed to bombard the visitor with information. I personally think it should have a more 'marketing' feel to it. Introduce visitors with some sexy, must-have stuff, and let them navigate to details on their own. Some not-so-plain graphics and design would be nice. I have no web design talent at all, but I know a well designed page when I see one.

There's a web-team (available via kde-www@) who *is* working on it. Design is just one part; getting to organize the content of the KDE site is a far bigget matter. What we really need is people who have the perseverance to sit through such an entire redesign.

I understand. I know that it is a huge job. It just brings me down a bit that KDE and the KDE apps don't have sweet websites that show off their great features. I know this forum isn't the place for this discussion, but I've been thinking about it for a while, and the previous comments finally brought me to putting it down.

Congrats on the new server hardware. Has anyone considered some type of automatically recurring donation program? I do this for other org's.

Well, i could imagine many people want to donate money, if it helps the project in a more direct way (like hardware instead of general donating). What about a monthly donation membership of which developers can be paid?

More hardware. Most of the KDE server infrastructure has been around unchanged for many, many years (never touch a running system, after all), and a number of them face performance problems at this point. The Bugzilla server was certainly the most overloaded, but we can project fairly well when the other boxes are going to become critical, and will invest in new gear accordingly. Which is possible thanks to your donations.

Nice that Dell gave a server. Thank you for
that, it really came to need.

Considering how big company Dell is and especially
a computer manufacturer, I would have thought that if
you really want to improve your PR with OSS community,
you would have addressed those issues what really bother
us all.

In my work, I constantly see and hear how much
problems there are with Linux and Dell. And I
think that those problems would already have been
solved if there would have been intrest to do so.

How about dedicating few engineers to look at those
problems and managers to communicate found issues
with chip manufacturers?

By supporting the Linux projects you acknowledge that
Linux exists, but for me now it looks that you're just
taking an advantage from it, not taking part to the
community.

Owner of two 2045FPW

(I know that you've different departments and opinions
in those may vary, but in customer point of view, how
the company behaves outside is the only thing what matters.)